The third concert of the 2026 İKSV Istanbul Music Festival that I attended took place at the Atatürk Cultural Centre on June 23. It is always a pleasure to listen to the foreign orchestras who come to Istanbul to play at the Festival, and compare them with Turkey’s own outfits. This year, we had the good fortune to hear the highly regarded Vienna Symphony Orchestra – who in 2025 celebrated the 125th anniversary of their foundation – under the baton of Petr Popelka, their Czech conductor.

First, the orchestra accompanied the Paris-born Chinese pianist Bruce Liu, currently resident in Montreal, in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37. (His Chinese first name is not Bruce, by the way, but Xiaoyu – which can mean ‘light rain’, ‘dawn rain’ or ‘little jade’, depending on the characters used.) The orchestra’s quality was apparent from the outset, especially in the perfectly co-ordinated woodwind entries. The soloist, meanwhile, impressed with his sensitivity in the first movement (it was not for nothing that he was declared the winner of the 18th International Chopin Competition in 2021), though I thought his attitude could have been a tad more forthright – especially in the cadenza, which was played with a softness I do not usually associate with Beethoven. (On second thoughts, though, maybe it was the Atatürk Cultural Centre’s dodgy acoustics that damped him down.)

That same sensitivity stood him in good stead in the slow second movement, however: here, he achieved just the right balance between delicacy and solemnity. The orchestra, meanwhile, demonstrated its ability to provide mousey-quiet accompaniment while co-ordinating seamlessly with the soloist. The third movement was agreeably energetic and upbeat, and we heard some nice fanfares from the horns. This time, the pianist gave the cadenza a good deal more oomph, and I was pleased to see him abandon his former reticence. Here is a 19-year-old Bruce Liu giving a confident performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 during the Sendai Competition in Japan. 

After the interval, the orchestra played Schubert’s four-movement Symphony No 9 in C major, D 944, sometimes described as ‘the Great’. This is the last symphony the composer completed before his death in 1828. Robert Schumann, who visited Vienna in 1838, discovered it in a pile of manuscripts shown to him by Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, and took a copy back with him to Leipzig, where it was finally given its first performance by the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. However, owing to its lengthy parts for the woodwinds and strings, the symphony was found to be difficult to play, and when Mendelssohn took it to Paris in 1842 and to London in 1844, orchestras flatly refused to play it. In fact, it took until the early years of the 20th century for the work to become part of the standard repertory. 

In this long and not a little taxing symphony, the second movement, in particular, is somewhat over-generous in the duration department; to my shame, I had to pinch myself repeatedly to stay awake. That is not to say, of course, that the orchestra was anything but magnificent: they negotiated the technical challenges – such as the accelerandi (i.e., gradual speedings-up) and the abrupt changes of tempo – with perfect aplomb. Meanwhile, the conductor maintained the music’s forward momentum with a commendable display of athleticism on the podium. In the following rendition of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, we hear the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

The encore, a piece for pizzicato strings, was a textbook example of perfect co-ordination in an area traditionally regarded as dangerous, and for good reason: one mistimed pluck, and the effect is ruined. How long will it be, I wondered, before Turkish orchestras are able to bring off a feat of this nature? Fortunately, given the way things are going, I can confidently predict that it won’t be all that long. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, our reeds resonant, our mouthpieces moist and our bows bobbing busily up and down until then.